Care Of / Eurydice by Ella Rous

CW: Death, grief

I am trying to be better. I’m trying

to be a Buzzfeed article: “Ten Ways

to Get Better Sleep” or “Explaining

the Body Neutrality Movement.”

I’m not a bad person, but I think

about breaking things with my fist

or tongue. This white afternoon glints

off the knife and the dog’s dark eyes.

I bring it down on the cutting board.

Dirt doesn’t sit well in the disposal;

mushrooms play dead on the horizon.

Don’t look at the horizon, and don’t

look for me behind you: I’m not in

the cave, I’m sitting in the shower

or pushing my paper limbs like a

cart through the grocery store aisles.

My hands, reaching for the light,

instead clasp a city of sin. Some

mornings I wake like a car crashing

into a bridge. Don’t look at it, the car

and the body and the water the same

all at once, please, I’m trying to be

better. Instead - kiss me here and

here and here, the light making glass

houses of old wounds. Why haven’t

you saved me yet? Was it the kitchen

on fire, or the smoke in my head leaving

charred lines like arrows in the desert?

This isn’t gasoline dripping from my

pointing arm, finding Sodom again and

again like a compass needle. I’m not a bad

person, it’s the city inside me, the city I’m

trying to escape, the water I was forged

from. No, I’m trying to find it: the promised

land where the light rises from every cup

at once into the coffee sky, figures poised

and silhouetted, laughter unwinding like a

roll of film. Take me there. Just don’t look back.

---

Ella Rous (she/her) is a first-year student currently attending the University of Texas at Austin as a Plan II and psychology double major. Though her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Emerge Literary Journal and Red Lemon Review, she is best known for being vocally queer and for her zebra patterned platform crocs. Her twitter handle is @creatingella.